Really this is all about domain of insufficient measuring. It would amount to determinism of the sex of procreation by sexual positions. All good and fun till years later we learn how stupid we all are (e.g., fmri).

What about the Soon et al. experiment performed in, I think, 2008 that could predict subjectively free decisions up to 10 seconds prior to the subject's awareness?

Why do we keep falling back on Libet (1984) when that was almost 30 years ago?

There are also much bigger problems in the free-will hypothesis like the fact that it defies the possibility for explanation. I think Wesley C. Salmon (Causality and Explanation) adequately shows that wherever you have a useful explanation of something you also have causality upon which the explanation is based.

If explanation is dependent on causality then free-will cannot be explained and we have only faith. That doesn't work as a scientific explanation. We should also examine that if free-will were true then why do consequentialist systems of justice as opposed to retributive justice work better?

There are many more problems with the free-will hypothesis than are addressed in this article.

I don't expect anything to move people from the position of free-will since there is absolutely no legitimate reason for being in that position. A 60% chance of predicting a decision is better than the 0% chance of explaining free-will. I dunno, I think we have to look at both sides. The ability to predict decisions this way is in its infancy. However we all predict each others actions all the time. When we file into a subway car we have this uncanny ability to predict each others' movements for example. I can predict with about 90% accuracy what any of my friends or family will do in a given situation. What is the chance that any of them will spontaneously do something completely out of character? Probably a lot lower.

I think people who argue for free-will are just naive to be honest. They are clinging to simplistic notions of existence, justice and the human being.

This kind of seems like the billiard balls stage of physics prior to quantum mechanics in rationale. I really wish I'd gotten to study cognitive science so I knew whether that was an accurate summation of the state of affairs.

I think the problem is resolved by realizing that causality doesn't operate in a linear and narrow sequence. Causality is like a fabric like space-time and the entire universe is implicated in every event that occurs in the universe. If you pull on one corner of the fabric, the whole fabric moves.

In the philosophy of Hinduism/Buddhism this is called co-dependent origination. The "billiard ball" analogy suggests a linear and narrow causal chain. A chain that starts at one point and ends at another with a clear sequence between the two. Whereas the fabric analogy of causality involves an infinite number of factors that would be impossible to account for. Laplace's Demon couldn't even see the whole picture.

Nevertheless when we are talking about human will, or even quantum mechanics, we are still talking about causal systems which are effectively determinant, it's just impossible to know everything about it.

What about the Soon et al. experiment performed in, I think, 2008 that could predict subjectively free decisions up to 10 seconds prior to the subject's awareness?

The fact that (some, simple) decisions are taken unconsciously does not contradict them as being free-willed.

In addition, if I give random people on the street the choice between ten dollar and ten hits with the whip, I can predict with 100% certainty what they're going to decide. Does that disprove free will?

In addition, if I give random people on the street the choice between ten dollar and ten hits with the whip, I can predict with 100% certainty what they're going to decide. Does that disprove free will?

Depends on how many people you survey, and where the street is, but I bet it won't take a hundred heads to break your 100% certainty. Some people like whips.

Yes it does disprove free-will. The only reason anyone would make a choice contrary to their desire would be because of a conflicting desire. If you said "I am going to prove you don't have free-will" then they would likely choose the lashes, but only because of a conflicting desire to prove they have free-will.

Yes, but a simple decision like that doesn't really say much. It's something a person has likely done before, so the brain stores the function/process as subconscious data so that it may be called upon when desire and done in the same way. Take a complicatd decision, which has many variables, emotional and other, for instance, which house you want to buy and in whic location. Show me a test which can predict this and I'll be a believer

Not being able to calculate something currently doesn't give you license to assume it's incalculable. If you can give an actual reason to assume that we can't predict a decision like that, then you have some footing.

Also, if we already know that simple decisions can be predicted, why would you assume that complicated decisions would be qualitatively different enough to flip the sign and suddenly become unpredictable?

Furthermore, how does "unpredictability" imply free will? I'm really not clear on how you're defining free will in this thread, based on how you're describing it.

IMO the concept of free will is ill-posed. Our perceptions, decisions and actions will of course always be mirrored in a neuronal correlate. Even subjective states will have a neuronal signature, e.g. you might tell that some feels comfortable based on the neuronal activity.

In this sense it doesn't really matter whether you have "free will". A discussion about this issue will not lead to any satisfactory conclusion. A more interesting question is what kind of biases are caused by the mechanisms that implement decisions. For example, Daniel Kahneman wrote a nice book on this topic.

No, it's something you need to address. Calling upon memory and doing what you do habitually do, or running a little cost/benefit simulation just before taking the decision, does not disprove the existence of free will.

Looking through this discussion, and some of the fascinating papers linked herein, I have to say that that seems to be a bigger quandary than the topic itself. It's quite easy to show that "free will" exists, by telling people that they can choose whether to do something or not, and then observing that their actions will not be very predictable. At that macro level, which is what most laypeople mean when they say "free will," it's pretty obvious.

Burrowing down to the micro level, it gets a little less clear. People's consciousness seems to lag behind the actual decisionmaking process. But the question of whether that negates the concept of free will appears to be very much an open one. A decision is still being made; does it matter that there's a lag between that decision and the story we tell ourselves about it? I don't know, but it seems to me that using those findings to claim that "free will" is illusory is a bit dishonest, because it is a willful rejection of the popular definition of that term.

Then there are the physicists, whose work is really interesting, but I've never been clear on how the quantum uncertainty principle has anything to do with meatspace reality. What I mean is that, if all possibilities occur simultaneously, then whatever we're experiencing right now is just one of them. The others aren't accessible, so they are irrelevant. Fascinating, but irrelevant. "Free will" is a perfectly acceptable model of reality in that case, and like all models, it may be wrong, but it can be useful (credit goes to the statistician George Box).

Actually science is kind of irrelevant to free will as it can be dealt with completely within philosophy.

There are two common definitions of free will. First off the compatibilist version, which basically states that while our choices are not free (in the sense that they are indeed based on input + previous experiences + genetics) we still do make that one choice in the sense that information comes into the brain and actions come out of it. Some people like to call this free will, the act of making a choice, even if it was the only choice we ever could have made. Under the compatibilist definition it is obvious that we do have free will, but under this definition free will is also nothing special. It's not really interesting in any way.

The second definition is the original more archaic version that basically states that people are unmoved movers. Every decision we make is unaffected by previous events. It is uncaused and somehow magically springs into being within our brains. People who believe this often believe there is some kind of magical "soul" within us that does the deciding. This version of free will is however very badly defined. In fact I have never seen anyone define it as what it is, only as what it's not. It's not caused. It's also not random. Apparently there is a third option between caused and random (and no, not a combination of the two either), however no one can ever tell me what exactly this third option is. That's probably because subscribers to this version of free will are not really thinkers but just common people who have not thought about the issue but just assume there is something called "free will" because they "feel" it.

TLDR: There are 2 versions of free will. One is obvious and uninteresting and the other impossible and undefined.

This is a bit off topic; I'm making the jump from psychology to physics (with a dash of computer science), but I like to think of free will as this:

If there is no free will then, given enough information, we should be able to predict the future perfectly. If we knew the position and momentum of every molecule in the universe, and had a machine with enough computing power to simulate what would happen, we should be able to predict everything exactly.

On the flip side, if there is free will, the future is up in the air. Even with all the information possible we still are not be able to know the future.

This is where quantum physics offers some hope for free will. Scientists seems to think that it is only possible to know either the position or momentum of any given particle (uncertainty principle). If we observe one of the two, the other becomes instantly uncertain. So, if this is the case it may be impossible to tell the future even given all the information and computing power we could ask for.

I'm not 100% sure of the details of quantum mechanics so if anyone more scientifically inclined would care to elaborate please step in and correct me.

Even if we can't predict the outcome of our wills in the future due to the uncertainty principle that doesn't mean the will is somehow free. It's still either causal or random or a combination of the two.

Couple of issues with your perspective. You don't take into account that decision making within an individual and especially interpersonally is a chaotic system. I won't go into Chaos Theory too deeply but when 3 or more complicated systems interact it the percision with which you can measure individual components (mapping the brain for instance) will not increase you predictions significantly above chance. Astronomers see this problem all th time. There is also the principle of emergence, or more simply knowing everything about a systems lower level components doesn't percipitate into complete knowledge of the higher level ( basically you can't predict traffic by looking at a car part.)

As a side note, quantum physics doesn't bolster free will in anyway. Not being able to predict (quantum randomness) does not equate to libertarian free will. A coin is no more free than a sophisticated AI simply because it is random (this analogy is horrible and never use it). Finally, to beat a dead horse, your argument fails at a fundamental level.

If A (no free will) then B ( Predict future perfectly)
Not B therefore Not A <--- not a cogent argument.

I won't get into a boring lecture on Logic but this isn't a logical argument. Good luck on you future philosophysing you will likely occillate multiple times in your life before you start to really solidify your opinion. Just keep asking yourself how might you be wrong and eventually you'll run out of ideas... then ask people smarter than you rinse and repeat. If you want to read a really intersting book that ties psychology/physics, and philosophy on the free will argument look up Mike Gazzinga's (spelling?) "Who's in Charge?" This is the book that helped sew up a lot of loose ends I had in the free will argument.

First let me point out I never said Not B therefore A. I said Not B therefore A is still a possibility.

Second, with respect, I don't think you at all understood my argument. Chaos theory? Mapping the brain? 3 body problem? None of those things has anything to do with what I was saying, that is:

If you know the position and momentum of every particle in the universe then in theory all you would need was a machine that was powerful enough to calculate all their trajectories and you can predict the future with perfect accuracy. Which means no free will. (A powerful enough machine can simulate anything including 3 (or n) body problems even without knowing the general formula for position given time)

The fact is however, scientists seem to believe that it is not possible to simultaneously know these two facts (position and momentum) about particles of small enough size (uncertainty principle). If this is the case then it is possible (though definitely not certain) free will exists.

Psychology, chaos theory, whatever other stuff you want to bring up are moot points until we determine how particles actually move.

on a side note you are very condescending clearly haven't done your homework or even read my post carefully

I'll start off by apologizing if my post was condescending, it was never intended in that light. I was quickly posting something before I had to inmate interview showed up and this is just another example of why you should never submit an original draft. That being said this it is difficult to ascertain tone in text as brief as my response and if you are going to continue in academia you should might do well to either adopt thicker skin or grant a greater benefit of the doubt to people offering criticism. While philosophy is only a hobby of mine, psychology and cognition are areas where I have a non trivial amount of knowledge and experience. I should probably have just left well enough alone however the arguments around free will are some of my favorite to hash out and I am easily goaded into a discussion.

Again my rebuttal here is not meant to condescend to you but simply offer some counter points to consider. I did quickly skim your post and may have missed the distinction of possibility but it still fails on false premises. The world universe could be known down to every sub-atomical event and it is still very likely you would be unable to make distant predictions about even the lifespan of a single individual because that individual exists in (and is him/herself) a chaotic system. The elements of a chaotic system at almost every level of organization (ie neuron:brain:person:society) can self organize into predictable systems (known as emergence) but it is unlikely accurate longterm predictions can be made about the larger systems from their underlying components because they are incredibly sensitive to inital forces and it is impossible to know all the initial forces acting upon the components. This is a good review of the concepts of emergence and chaos theory though the book I suggest does a much better job going into the principles in detail as they pertain to cognition and free will. The jist being that knowing how the subatomical particles move won't increase predictive ablility because it is fundamentally impossible to know all the forces acting on a complex system such as a brain let alone a group of interaction brains. That was the point I was trying to make which I believe is incredibly relevant to your original points.

The big picture from my point is that while every event in chaotic system is caused/deterministic it is still unknowable; therfore a lack of predictive ability is not a sufficient criterion to argue for the existance of free will.

TL:DR I brought up chaos theory to show that a completely deterministic system can frustrate attempts at reliable prediction thus it isn't a strong argument for the possibility of free will.

Gotcha. Sorry. I came off as a bit harsh at the end also. I'm not an academic but I did major in psychology and computer science as an undergrad and now do one professionally and the other in my free time. (Just giving a background before we get into, what I can see being, a longer discussion). That said I'd like to rebut:

The world universe could be known down to every sub-atomical event and it is still very likely you would be unable to make distant predictions about even the lifespan of a single individual because that individual exists in (and is him/herself) a chaotic system.

If you know every sub-atomic event you would be able to predict every event with perfect accuracy (given a theoretical computer with enough power to actually do the calculations faster than the events come to fruition in the real world). I don't think chaos theory applies since chaos theory really only says problems with too many inputs are impractical (because so many things can go wrong) and not impossible.

If the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is, somehow, disproved to a reasonable degree, so is free will disproved to the same degree.

I find it difficult to translate "people have free will" or "people don't have free will" into terms that don't appeal to the supernatural. This is like a debate between the positions "god exists" and "god does not exist". I find it difficult to care about any of these positions as a matter of verifiable truth. As a matter of personal belief I think it is perfectly natural to choose among these, but these all seem to be far outside the scope of cogsci

It's philosophically impossible to prove that we have free will and yet I've never seen any good evidence or arguments against.

A lot of the time on Reddit I see people who think that physics shows we don't have free will, but there's no consensus I'm aware of amongst actual physicists which says that the laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity is necessarily incompatible with decision making.

I'm also impressed by the brilliant mathematician John H. Conway who talks about this subject a lot (in connection to his work on the 'Free Will Theorem'. As far as he's concerned, the onus is on the people denying free-will to come up with evidence and he feels that they have yet to produce any.

Edit: Here's a brief article from a Scientific American writer about free will and quantum mechanics.

Edit II: I find it incredible that the first response to my comment is simply to downvote it without comment. I've been on Reddit now for 6 years and Redditors are increasingly becoming incapable of debating ideas and instead are choosing to run this place as a popularity contest.

Well, I'm not a physicist, neuroscientist, or a philosopher, so maybe it's not surprising that I don't understand how Quantum Mechanics significantly changes casual understanding of the term 'Free Will', because if 'Free' in my 'Free Will' is a Quantum noise, randomness, I don't see how it's significantly different from determinism perspective. To me there is nothing 'Free' in casual sense. Your freedom is constrained by randomness. And you can find probabilistic determinism in such system(brain).

This comment in conjunction with this one pretty much encompass my perspective on the matter. After so many discoveries about the nature of our universe as natural phenomena (i.e., non-anthropomorphic and non-intellectual), why is the burden of proof on those to disprove free will? Why assume arbitrary agency amongst the massive amount of examples where it does not apply?

I agree. If someone says that non-physical entity enters physical reality through quantum randomness in the brain, affects 'decisions', the burden of proof is on that person to show violation of probabilities, or something. And if such statement is not falsifiable, then why should I care?

It's true, QM has a random probabilistic element to it, but beware- it's quite a bit different from the normal 'classical' experience of probability that you are familiar with (from e.g. rolling dice in a game). It's not at all obvious to me that probability as it occurs in QM means that our decisions are effectively stochastic.

It's interesting to see what Conway (and his physicist collaborator Kochen Specker) has to say about this subject and I'm not sure I can do it justice in a short Reddit comment.

I also still think it's fair to say that there's no consensus amongst physicists whether QM constrains free-will or not. I know that some physicists who have thought deeply about the problem believe it does, but then again, others disagree!

I'm not personally claiming that I have any special knowledge or insight except that I think that people who claim this is a settled issue are overstating their case.

A lot of the time on Reddit I see people who think that physics shows we don't have free will, but there's no consensus I'm aware of amongst actual physicists which says that the laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity is necessarily incompatible with decision making.

You equated "free will" with "decision making" here, but I'm not sure that when people say "free will," they actually mean something that can be replaced wholesale by only "decision making." Obviously humans make decisions. What exactly that entails, and how they make them, is what's up for debate.

I think that the point people make with physics and free will is that physics is deterministic (and even QM is probabilistic), and as part of the physics, we are deterministic too. Since what people generally seem to mean when they say "free will" is something along the lines of "I made this decision, not physics," pointing out that 'I' is part of physics seems to imply that people's conception of free will is incorrect. Without a proper definition of free will that makes sense, it's hard to say if free will "exists" or not.

Free will: The ability to make a choice that is independent of your entire history.

Aha! you say, what about throwing dice to make decisions? Well, by the above definition, that's not free-will, because dice and any other classical random number generator have a state which is dependent on their history.

The Conway Specker paper (I linked to in another comment) claims to prove that under QM and relativity, even fundamental particles can have properties which are independent of their history. Again- this is something that can't be explained in terms of classical randomness.

Free will: The ability to make a choice that is independent of your entire history.

Wait... so this is something that people believe humans actually have? Isn't "my entire history" what makes up who I am? Like, if you remove all my memories and experiences, I wouldn't be the same person. So making a decision completely separated from those things... well that would no longer be me making the decision.

It's in the sense that you're not constrained by your entire history. In the sense that a God like physicist could look at your every constituent particle and be unable to predict with certainty what choice you will make.

It's not in the sense that your entire history has no influence at all on what decisions you make. You're still more likely to make some decisions than others depending on who you are.

In the sense that a God like physicist could look at your every constituent particle and be unable to predict with certainty what choice you will make.

But... that just makes your decisions random then, right? If you can look at all the physics and still not know which neuron is going to fire, then the only way that's possible is if some random element is injected. But if people's decisions are just randomized, it really doesn't seem like that's what most people mean when they talk about "free will."

I know about QM and randomness. On a macro level though, it still has to correspond to something. If the decisions aren't coming from the neurons (which is what makes up "me"), then where are they coming from?

Edit: That was snarky. What I mean is that I doubt you have a deep understanding of QM and randomness given that the best theoretical physicists in the world haven't yet agreed on a full explanation for how to interpret the results of QM. (Or maybe they have and no-one told me.)

Again, I think it's fair to say that free-will in relation to QM is still being argued about by experts in the field and that no consensus has been arrived at.

I have not seen any reasonable explanation of QM related to free will that doesn't boil down to "but it's the only thing we know about that could possibly save me from accepting the evidence that free will is an illusion because I can't emotionally accept that dualism isn't valid"

From the explanation I've seen, it's pretty clear what the correct answer is, and the only thing holding people back from going with it is a refusal to accept an explanation that goes against their intuitions.

We all have daily moment to moment experience of the sensation of free will.

Of course, you can argue that the experience is an illusion, but this seems to go so far against how we perceive and interact with the world that you need to bring some kind of argument to the table to at least

I don't think it's unreasonable for someone who has experienced the sensation of free-will her whole life to want to know what the evidence or argument is if someone tells her that she's suffering a delusion. Maybe you do.

Having said that, I don't think it's that important what the default position is. You can start from either a position of for or against- the question is how do you get to the conclusion?

We all have daily moment to moment experience of the sensation of free will.

No, we have the daily experience of making decisions, which may or may not be constrained by prior states to some varying degree (to which, as decision-makers, we do not always have privileged access to the antecedants). This is not the same as the "sensation" of free will. What does that even mean anyway? Decision making as an activity is totally compatible with a physically determined system where future states are dependent upon prior states, as well as within systems which have random effects.

If that's the route you're going, then you're basically stuck in the same place as pondering on the homonculus in the Cartesian theater.

However, the "not constrained" that you claim to experience is seemingly closer to that of the soft determinism or a compatibalism doctrine, which actually is not tied to causal determinism. In these situations, an agent still maintains agency of action - volition can still be considered an aspect of the actor - but that doesn't mean that it's not an outcome of that agent's history either.

As a result, I tend to find all the arguments for free will lacking, primarily because all the definitions for any free will are either too strict or too lax (compatibalism). I believe it was Hume (thought I could be mistaken) that suggested that the alternative to operating within the context of previous history, and so making decisions based on that, was effectively leaving your actions to be determined by a roulette wheel. So which is it? Do we have reasons based on our past, or random chance? And how would we even know to identify the difference between "will" and random chance? (Short answer - there is no way.)

In the meantime, some of the comments have noted that the onus is on the person suggesting the existence of free will. Although I think this is impossible to demonstrate, I agree - it adds no explanatory value to our theories of behavior. If you hold up any of these popular conceptions to a light, you should see shadows of Hans Dreish's entelechy or the elan vitale - concepts that were dropped because they provided no additional explanation or prediction within their domains.

As one more note, as much as you mention Conway, you don't make it a strong point that Conway's paper actually says nothing definitive about the case for humans - all it does it remove humans as being particularly privileged observers. Basically, it's assuming that this is a property we can ascribe to the experimenter, then it follows that it's a similar property to the experimented particle.

There are arguments at the table. The question is about burden of proof, and trying to shift it when there's already evidence against it is dishonest.

Having said that, I don't think it's that important what the default position is. You can start from either a position of for or against- the question is how do you get to the conclusion?

It does matter though.

"Prove to me that Zeus doesn't exist", is a much different position than "prove to me Zeus exists".

Free will isn't a simple issue/discussion. There are many things that need to be properly, and unanimously defined. Things like what does "self" mean in this case. And after that, you need to look at the data and see what it tells you. And from that data, you can make some preliminary statements like... "It appears that conscious free will doesn't exist, because our choices are really coming from a sub conscious origin." Then you can flesh that out even more.

If you are coming from the "prove it doesn't exist" end, there's no amount of proof that will realistically satisfy your criteria. There are always ways of escape, and dismissal.

In the case of Zeus, people have provided excellent arguments why he is not needed as an explanation.

The whole scientific enlightenment is one long argument showing that we don't need Zeus, or any other supernatural entity as explanations for our weather, or why we fall ill etc and Darwinism was a completely successful attempt to explain life without invoking supernaturalism.

I don't see why free will should be any different! If you think free will is like Zeus, a delusion experienced my large numbers of people, then by all means, provide an argument and we can move on.

In the case of Zeus, people have provided excellent arguments why he is not needed as an explanation.

That's not the same. Scissors aren't needed to cut anything, but they still exist.

I don't see why free will should be any different! If you think free will is like Zeus, a delusion experienced my large numbers of people, then by all means, provide an argument and we can move on.

The people that showed how Zeus didn't exist, came from the side that he wasn't real by default. The people that kept him relevant for so long were the ones shouting, prove he isn't real. Which is the more logical approach? To accept that Zeus/Free Will exists based on a delusion, but no evidence... Or that it doesn't.

I'm not here to argue either way about whether or not free will exists. I'm simply stating that the burden of proof can't be shifted onto "prove it doesn't exist". Just like how Creationists say prove that the Earth isn't 10,000 yrs old.

We all have daily moment to moment experience of the sensation of free will.

When you talk about "having the sensation of free will" what specifically are you talking about? I have the sensation of making decisions, but I'm not sure what a "sensation of free will" would even feel like.

Okay, but how does making a constrained decision feel different from an unconstrained one? This feeling of free will that you say people have - how do you know it's what an unconstrained decision feels like?

I think "I" is the wrong place to delve in there. "I" is the collection of memories, experiences, etc. that are enclosed in my brain. "I" is not too difficult to conceive of a reductionist, deterministic definition for.

"Chose" on the other hand, is a word that not many people take the time to unpack.

There are many things that would need proper definitions. You can't focus on one alone, you need to lay out a base of acceptable definitions, and then build from that.

I chose "I" because some people don't accept "I have free will" due to the conscious mind not showing that it makes decisions. And there are others that say that free will exists because the sub conscious is still a part of "I" so it doesn't matter if the choices are conscious or not.

The claim is that free will exists -- that I have non-deterministic agency over my decisions. The burden of proof is on those claiming free will exists, not those claiming it doesn't. Ergo he does have to "shift the burden of proof" to make his point, and that is not a valid thing for him to do.

Can you play rationalist taboo on your use of the word "chose"? What, specifically, did you just do?

Edit:
Also, define "crazy." Because from an information-theoretical perspective, a model of the universe which only follows deterministic physics is simpler than one which also has non-deterministic agents injecting causality into it. So Occam's falls on the side of determinism. (I'm not going to say it falls on the side of "free will doesn't exist" because I think talking about whether free will "exists" or not is a mistake.)

You don't seem to understand both viewpoints here. No one's claiming that you don't make decisions, or that you don't choose.

Rationalist taboo is exactly the opposite of semantics. Rationalist taboo is about getting under the labels to the actual substance. So again, tell me: what, precisely did you do when you "chose"? What does it mean to "choose"? What physically happens when you choose?

And the most important part: what do you mean by "free will"? Because you seem to think that if free will exists, we make decisions, and if it doesn't, we don't. But computers make decisions, so that's obviously not what people mean by free will.

The onus isn't on anybody to figure out whether or not that's true. The onus is on science to figure out how.

Agreed. I'm still trying to figure out how "free will" is even a helpful concept for understanding decision-making. I would much rather see scientific studies framed in terms like "here is a study that helps us understand the roles of conscious and unconscious cognition in decision making" but instead we get "here is a study that refutes (or supports) free will." What fucking year is it?

Just look at the history of bad science and mythology. Our "knowing and accepting" that the sun revolved around the earth did much to prevent us from figuring out how it works. What we know and accept as truth are not necessarily truth, which brings me to my next point: we don't know or accept most things exist until after we've figured out how they work. In the name of good science, we can't claim something is true or exists until we've proven it, which generally involves figuring out how it works. Further, we can test a hypothesis and expect to disprove a theory, but instead end up proving it -- i.e. we figure out how something works without accepting or knowing it exists first.

You said we have to know or accept that something exists before we can test it. No, it merely has to exist to be testable. Our knowledge of it or acceptance of it are irrelevant.

You said we have to know or accept that something exists before we can test it. No, it merely has to exist to be testable. Our knowledge of it or acceptance of it are irrelevant.

Now we're just playing a semantics game. "Merely has to exist" is the same as "accepting that it exists".

If you see an ant running along the floor, you have to accept that it's there, and exists before you can figure out anything about it. You literally can't show how it moves without accepting that it's a real thing.

Now we're just playing a semantics game. "Merely has to exist" is the same as "accepting that it exists".

Those are literally not the same thing though, so this isn't even semantics. Those have entirely different meanings. "Something exists" and "humans know something exists" are not remotely the same statements.

If you see an ant running along the floor, you have to accept that it's there, and exists before you can figure out anything about it. You literally can't show how it moves without accepting that it's a real thing.

Looking at the ants is an experiment you run to prove they exist. The ant still exists before I look at the floor to see it. I can also experiment on the ant to test their existence in other methods to determine if they exist without first accepting that they do. Similarly, I can place a rat trap 'just in case' to catch a rat that I have no knowledge of existing in the first place. I can also place a burglar alarm to stop a burglar that does not exist yet, and may not exist. When the alarm reacts or not, I can learn whether or not the burglar exists. This is information I learned about the burglar without first accepting or knowing that a burglar exists. We also learned that the earth revolves around the sun while "knowing and accepting" that the sun revolves around the earth.

What we learn as a result of an experiment does not have to agree with our hypothesis...

Those are literally not the same thing though, so this isn't even semantics. Those have entirely different meanings. "Something exists" and "humans know something exists" are not remotely the same statements.

It is a semantics game because you're purposely (maybe not) misunderstanding the meaning behind what I said. "Literally not the same thing" is literally what a semantics game is. They are realistically the same thing.

Looking at the ants is an experiment you run to prove they exist. The ant still exists before I look at the floor to see it.

You don't know that at all though. It could be a hallucination. You have to prove that it's actually real first.

I can also experiment on the ant to test their existence in other methods to determine if they exist without first accepting that they do.

Thank you for proving my point. I never said you have to prove something exists in order to accept that it exists. I said you have to prove it exists before you can figure out how it works. Huge difference.

You determining that the ant exists in no way shows how an ant "works".

My scenario specifically points out that proven existence has to come first, and then you can experiment to show how locomotion (in the example) works.

Similarly, I can place a rat trap 'just in case' to catch a rat that I have no knowledge of existing in the first place.

Yes, but unless you catch the rat, you have no proof that it exists in your house.

I can also place a burglar alarm to stop a burglar that does not exist yet, and may not exist.

The burglar won't exist in your house until he is there. Simply having a detector, doesn't prove anything.

This is information I learned about the burglar without first accepting or knowing that a burglar exists.

Setting up a detector proves absolutely nothing, except that you (or someone you paid) can setup a detector.

We also learned that the earth revolves around the sun while "knowing and accepting" that the sun revolves around the earth.

Ummm... No. Someone came along and came up with the hypothesis that the Earth revolves around the Sun first, then they showed how. This happened because the Sun around the Earth theory had flaws. Which means that it didn't properly show how it worked. But... in either scenario, the Sun and the Earth were "known/accepted" to exist prior to anything else.

Redditors are increasingly becoming incapable of debating ideas and instead are choosing to run this place as a popularity contest

It's always been this way, especially in the larger subreddits. Surprise: Cogsci now has nearly 60k subscribers. Mostly presumably because it "sounds cool." I'm probably part of the problem, as I have no background in cognitive science, biology or anywhere relevant.

I find it incredible that the first response to my comment is simply to downvote it without comment. I've been on Reddit now for 6 years and Redditors are increasingly becoming incapable of debating ideas and instead are choosing to run this place as a popularity contest.

Or people with bots that simply downvote everything in their line of fire.

Most of the arguments I see discuss whether there exist constraints on our choices. After all, freedom in physics usually refers to the absence of constraints.

BTW, I wouldn't be able to tell you how to measure conscious subjective experience either. Still, most of us seem to accept that we possess consciousness.

Maybe free will is beyond the periphery of what's testable and so shouldn't be considered a scientific concept. I dunno, but I'm not ready to give up on it just yet. At the very least, we have a strong sensation of having free-will (though some people here dispute even this). So, I think there's something that's worth studying, even if it turns out to be a chimera.

People whom think that our current understanding of physical laws and science disproves free will are the same as the people that believed the Earth was flat because of the way the land and sky looked.

How could there ever be such a thing as free will? Chemicals react, electrical impulses fire, decisions get made. 'The potato chip effect,' When the desire to snack outweighs the desire to watch TV, we go into motion.

Since the other responses were crap, I suggest you look into compatibilism. It is the idea that there is a conception of free will which is compatible with determinism. It is pretty popular within the philosophical debate.

If karma is the game, I lost before I started. This is a thread about "free will" so the armchair philosophers are out in force.

On the other hand, if my goal is some unbarred verbal repartee, and I'm free to trounce the competition in ways unacceptable in any other domains in my life...well, the alcohol in my brain says "SO BE IT!"

A. Random links from ex-philosophy professors trying to sell books hold no weight with anyone, anywhere, ever. The fact that it's "literally the top result" only points out how little you actually know about this topic. You couldn't be bothered to spend more than 12 seconds on it!?

B. I'm guessing you haven't read your own link. I have. It backs my points, even if many things within it are empty philosobabble.

C. Oh my god, I hope I get banned, too! I should not be wasting time with you shit-for-brains-fucking-children

Then take whatever source you want. There are plenty of philosophers and psychologists who address determinism and predictability in whatever scope you want it addressed. But I'm not your teacher or your professor, so I'm not doing your homework for you.

The link literally concludes that determinism does not imply predictability, almost verbatim.

Seriously, I'm not doing your homework for you. This is covered in any intro to philosophy class and is a mandatory topic for a psychology degree, as it is covered in the history of psychological theory.

There are a ton of sources, and Google and Wikipedia can find them for you. You don't need me to. Even Stephen Hawking has written about this issue. Use his book as a source if you want. But it's not my responsibility to teach you anything.

Not only are you being an ass, you're just wrong, and I'm not playing this "no, give me another source" game with a troll.

I'll stop being an ass if you want to have an actual discussion instead of appealing to "accepted" facts and nonsense sources.

I am telling you right now that the definition of determinism that matters for this discussion is the one that suggests that any future state in our universe can be directly derived from any fully described past state. This is a valid way our universe could work and it would preclude free will. Fortunately, it's demonstrably not the way our universe works.

Give me a different definition of determinism if you think a different one applies.

Refute my claim that our universe does not match the one I provided, if you think you can.

Since you didn't bother to say what you believe to be contradictory in which sentence, I'll take a stab at both.

If you're complaining about the first sentence and you're claiming I don't know the meaning of words, it'd be nice to know what you think determinism means. The definition I was using agrees with Wikipedia, so I'll pull some quotes from there:

Determinism is a metaphysical philosophical position stating that for everything that happens there are conditions such that, given those conditions, nothing else could happen.

Determinism often is taken to mean simply causal determinism, which in physics is the idea known as cause-and-effect. It is the concept that events within a given paradigm are bound by causality in such a way that any state (of an object or event) is completely determined by prior states.

Now, I'm assuming that you're using dynamism to refer to non-linear dynamical systems and not "the theory that all phenomena (as matter or motion) can be explained as manifestations of force." Dynamical systems are still deterministic because from one set of initial conditions, only one possible outcome results. The unpredictability of the outcome rests in the sensitivity to initial conditions and computational round-off error instability. This does not mean they cannot be predicted in theory, just that they cannot be predicted in practice.

Now, let's suppose you have an issue with my second sentence. It's always tricky talking about free will because everyone has a different definition and everyone assumes theirs is the only valid one. It's true that compatibilists argue that a deterministic universe does not rule out free will, but they do so by changing the definition of free will to something which, I would argue, no longer constitutes free will. Their argument is one of semantics, not of metaphysics. In either case, the compatibilists' arguments have nothing to do with predicting the future, so they're not really relevant to this discussion.

Now, since I clearly don't understand what words mean, there must be some enormous mistakes in what I just wrote. Perhaps could you point out my mistakes instead of making snarky comments.

First off, it doesn't matter for this discussion. The person I responded to essentially claimed that we live in a clockwork universe, therefore free will makes no sense. That makes no sense if we don't live in a clockwork universe (which we don't).

Second off, your claim is not true. Determinism is predictability. Every argument I've ever read about their "subtle differences" is simply underestimating what determinism would truly mean.

This is a difficult discussion to have with a bunch of people who keep referencing things like Jurassic Park and the first (useless) article that pops up on Google searches.

Not at all, quantum mechanics and chaotic systems are real.

Of course they are.

To believe that determinism is predictability is to believe that the weather either involves magic or is predictable.

Now you've lost me. Weather is a chaotic system, not a deterministic system.

Just what, exactly, do you believe the word "determinism" means, if it doesn't imply a universe in which future states can (theoretically) be predicted from past states?

Uh, citation needed?

The "clockwork" metaphor is--and always has been--an easy way to conceptualize determinism as I am defining it. You already agree with me that chaotic systems and dynamism are real, so why are you asking for a citation?

People keep telling me that predictability and determinism are two different things, but nobody can explain why or why they think that has anything to do with the free will discussion.

Ok, now we have found our source of disagreement. We are not using the same definition of deterministic.

I'm using the scientific one, meaning that a systems future behavior is fully determined by its initial conditions. This does not imply practical predictability and chaos theory is the study of "deterministic chaos", which is what they mean when they say "chaos". I found a great quote on wikipedia from Edward Lorenz that sums it up better than I can: "Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future."

I don't really care about the semantic debate over whether probabilistic determinism should be called determinism or not. Perhaps that's where we disagree, but that disagreement is mostly based on competing interpretations of quantum mechanics, not on evidence. Throwing away all the debate about the philosophical implications of determinism just because of quantum effects, which are probabilistic rather than random, technically changes what determinism means but doesn't practically change it seems silly to me, but that's clearly an opinion.

People keep telling me that predictability and determinism are two different things, but nobody can explain why or why they think that has anything to do with the free will discussion

I think we've covered the difference already, and is it now clear how it relates to the free will discussion? You can not have free will in terms of being part of deterministic universe without being a predictable robot.

Yep, I had my terms jumbled a bit. It's been over a decade since I've read up extensively on chaos theory. I had been thinking the term "chaos" was used to cover both stochastic (e.g. non-deterministic) systems and deterministic but unpredictable systems.

I could swear I remember there being evidence that certain physical systems have been shown to be non-deterministic, thought apparently I am wrong. Even quantum systems may yet prove deterministic rather than probabilistic if we had a complete picture of how it all works down there.

I'm finding this deeply unsatisfying. I mean, it's pretty obvious we make individual choices. I have to sit here and decide what to type right now, but the higher order processes of a thinking mind surely don't bypass their deterministic roots.

I'm not arrogant enough to claim that I know what will and wont be discovered in the future, but nobody has even begun to suggest a mechanism so far.

Reductionists like Dennett have painted themselves into a bizarre corner where they claim qualia don't exist. My own theory is that the reductionists who genuinely believe this are themselves actual manifestations of philosophical zombies.

I'm not arrogant enough to claim that I know what will and wont be discovered in the future, but nobody has even begun to suggest a mechanism so far.

A mechanism for what? An unpredictable yet deterministic philosophy? Because we've had mathematical models for this for a long time. I wish I could remember the name of it, but if it's that foreign of a concept to you, I will help try and look it up. I remember this being a necessity to learn in getting my BS degree in psych. How far are you into your degree plan? If you haven't covered deterministic philosophies yet, you should eventually.

Reductionists like Dennett have painted themselves into a bizarre corner where they claim qualia don't exist.

If qualia exist, that does not mean it can't be reduced. I doubt Dennett said that the "taste of wine" doesn't exist.

It sounds like you're talking about the eliminativist camp rather than the reductionist. Reductionists typically think that qualia can be reduced to states of the nervous system.

If indeed subjective experience is identical to states of the nervous system, then subjective experience can be measured, at least in principle. Neuroscientists are starting to build bridges here, but the work is incredibly difficult.

What is good for silicon, is good for DNA. I personally see no compelling evidence that there is anything other than clockwork, although I am open to learning more about this.

Sure, it 'seems' like there is a thing called choice.

At the microlevel, certainly it is true that cause and effect is at the root of all decisions - but even at the macro level this holds true. Whether you take the job offer or not, is likely already a foregone conclusion, even though you may struggle with it.

Why does it matter if the subjective experiences can be objectively measured, when objectively the bio/electrical mechanics can be.

More, if the subjective experience can't be measured, how could we ever have any clue as to whether 'consciousness has properties that influence outcomes' or if it is rather a reflection or shadow of physical processes.

The part of 'free will' being discussed needs to be more specifically defined.

This article is arguing that neural activity in non conscious areas of the brain can be explained by reasons other than the idea that the subconscious brain is the one making the choice for us. I would argue that the idea that the conscious brain makes the decision does not necessarily mean that we do in fact have free will, that could simply be the only decision that would have come about anyway.

You make decisions based on what is best, after defining the parameters, and the decision of which parameters to consider is also based on what appears best. Even if we don't always follow rational logic, that is because cognitive bias is changing our 'ranking' system for weighing the decisions.

TLDR: The decisions we make may be the ones we would always have made regardless of whether or not they originate in the conscious or subconscious areas of the brain. This article only suggests that decisions could originate from the conscious brain instead of the subconscious, not necessarily implying free will.